The Solitaire Mystery

The Solitaire Mystery is a novel by the Norwegian author Jostein Gaarder, born in Oslo in 1952, published in 1990. It became a bestseller in Scandinavia and in several other countries. It belongs to the same vein of philosophical popularisation as Gaarder's earlier Sophie's World, though here the ideas are carried by fantasy, and the book never explicitly names philosophers or theories.

The story follows two strands that gradually intertwine. The first concerns Hans-Thomas, a twelve-year-old Norwegian boy who travels across Europe with his father, a sailor with a passion for philosophy, in search of his mother, who left them eight years earlier to "find herself". Along the way a strange little man gives Hans-Thomas a magnifying glass, and chance leads them to stop in Dorf, a small Swiss village, where a baker gives him a sticky bun with a minuscule book hidden inside, unreadable to the naked eye.

The second strand is the story Hans-Thomas uncovers with the help of the glass: that of a baker whose grandfather, as a young man, was shipwrecked on an island, where he met Frode, an old sailor who fought loneliness by bringing each of the fifty-three cards of his deck to life. Among them is the Ace of Hearts, who often "loses herself", a trait Hans-Thomas comes to associate with his mother. The predictions in the little book begin to reveal details of his own search, and the boy faces the perennial questions about identity, the meaning of life and how far we can shape our own destiny.

Critics were divided. Kirkus Reviews praised passages that were ingenious and startling, recalling the philosophical fantasies of the Victorian writer George MacDonald, but found much of the book repetitious, with hazy imagery. In Norway the novel won the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature in 1990.